Kootenai Environmental Alliance

Property Rights Council to Sponsor Seminar

Holidays are not slowing the rightward march of the Bonner County Property Rights Council. Monday night, the controversial Property Rights Council is sponsoring a “public seminar” on “The Theoretical Basis for a Property Rights Council.” The featured speaker is Sandpoint-based James L. Payne. Mr. Payne is a frequent contributor to the polluter-friendly and Koch-connected Independent Institute and the Foundation for Economic Education. It is unclear how this seminar got officially scheduled — the PRC meeting scheduled for last week was cancelled and prior meetings made no mention of the seminar.

Mr. Payne’s anti-government views are not exactly mainstream. For example, he is critical of government spending, sure. But he’s even opposed to FEMA and government-supported disaster aid. (“The private sector can and does address all of these issues.”) He is sharply critical of environmental regulations, sure. But he’s opposed to regulations designed to prevent major environmental “catastrophes” like the gulf oil spill. Instead, Payne concludes, “In the final analysis, overcoming environmental abuse is not likely to be achieved by governmental dictation. Instead, it is a process of social learning that includes everyone: friends and neighbors, reporters, pamphleteers, teachers, researchers—and companies too, as they discover how pollution hurts their image and their bottom line.” Yeah. That’ll work.

For the record, the Independent Institute has never received funding from Koch Industries or any Charles Koch entity and is hence no more “Koch-connected” than are you.

And incidentally, CO2 is not a pollutant. It is a central ingredient in the ecosystem and essential for all of life. Moreover, the evidence shows that Earth surface temperatures have been either flat or slightly decreasing since at least 1998, as CO2 levels have increased. As a result and in keeping with what we now know through the Climategate and Climategate 2.0 revelations of scam “science” in the claims of climate alarmism, the evidence shows that solar and other factors are the driving factors, not CO2.

As for FEMA, perhaps you should examine the evidence that shows how this bureaucracy has been a disaster in having caused immense suffering: